Category: Politics

These days, that is the prime question on the minds of the country club republicans, their corporate puppet masters, and the communists. They are plotting, spending money, and rubbing Karl Rove’s big round head trying to come up with the answer. The solutions have been to steal the nomination from the front runner in a brokered convention, if that fails plan B is to run a 3rd party to ensure a republican loss in the general election, while at the same time declaring none of this would be a problem in the first damn place if the pesky blue collar middle class would just go ahead and die.

I am thrilled at what Mr. Trump has accomplished during this election cycle. At the end of it all, he may turn out to be a phony baloney, but he has brought to the forefront what most harms the severely wounded but alive and well American Middle Class – illegal immigration, bad trade deals, and destruction of the US manufacturing base. And when people who are fighting for their lives find someone who appears to speak for them, they are going to fight. He has forever exposed the career politicians for who they are and likely has changed the voting and political landscape for a long time to come. The large crowds that are coming out in support are not purely conservative, not purely liberal, most certainly not the dependent class, and most certainly not the brain washed spoiled brat communists and professional protestors who are causing trouble. They are Americans who want their country back and Ronald Regan was the last person able to bring them all together and right our ship of state. I am making no comparison between the two men, but both seemed to have taken a different route to arrive at the same destination. And depending what is done with the prize it could turn out good as it did for Regan or it could go the other way. That is the great unknown, but America after all did gamble on hope and change.

It just saddens me that for so many years, and I am not the Lone Ranger on this one, I believed that a political party was interested in looking out for me. For certain, my gullibility and naiveté were exposed.

The ideological puritans across the spectrum are certainly part of our problem – especially those with big megaphones and inflated senses of self-worth. It would not surprise me if many of them drifted off into obscurity when this episode of American history concludes. We will just have to see. But be assured of this, the American people are to the point they will walk through and over them to get to the voting booth.

I consider myself conservative in my thinking, but an ideology should not be a national suicide pact. And most certainly it is time to end politics as a career and an industry. I am certain that there are plenty of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents of all ethnicities who still believe in America and who are willing to stand together. For the betterment of America maybe it is the elitist political class that needs to die.

But to answer the burning question. I listen to some news programming. I read a lot of news and commentary. I listen to some talk radio although I must admit I have recently whittled it down some. It is not uncommon to read and hear these media types talk about Rush Limbaugh and wonder out loud how he can maintain such a large audience. The never realize that if they honestly wrote and reported the news Mr. Limbaugh would have no audience. If they did their jobs completely and honestly, people would not have a need to turn to him or others to hear what they otherwise would not – ever.

So the answer for the country club is simple. For many years you have lied to the American people. You have lined your pockets with corporate dollars and failed to keep the promises to the people who put you into power. For the recent years and especially since Americans put you in charge of Congress, you have not stood on a single principle. You have been spineless and conniving. Your time to stop Trump passed you by long ago when you failed to govern in the interests of the American people. And now you are in for an epic beat down because you simply did not live up to your promises or do your job. And Mitt Romney et al are not going to save your sorry asses.

© 2016 J. D. Pendry All Rights Reserved.

Back in January, Fox News told us that when Mexican narco-terrorist Joachim “El Chapo” Guzman was arrested, Mexican authorities found a weapon that was traced back to the Fast and Furious “gun walking” exercise that armed several thousand Mexican thugs by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The agency was trying to track how weapons moved from illegal purchases in the US through the criminal elements south of the border. Well, today that rifle is news again because the Associated Press picked up on the story finally;

The [Justice Department said in a letter to members of Congress that a .50-caliber rifle that Mexican officials sent for tracing after Guzman’s arrest in January has been connected to Fast and Furious.

Officials say the weapon was one of 19 firearms that Mexican authorities said was recovered from the hideout and was the only one determined to be associated with the botched sting operation, in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed gun-runners to buy weapons in hopes of tracking them and disrupting gun smuggling rungs.

But, no worries because the BATFE has issued a statement of regret, so it’s all cool again;

“ATF and the department deeply regret that firearms associated with Operation Fast and Furious have been used by criminals in the commission of violent crimes, particularly crimes resulting in the deaths of civilians and law enforcement officials,” Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik, head of the Justice Department’s legislative affairs office, wrote in a March 15 letter to congressional leaders.

This only proves how effective the entire program was – they have been able to track the guns all the way to the top echelons of the Mexican gangs. Yay!

Oh, yeah, there are still about 1200 more firearms out there in the hands of criminals, but I’m sure they’ll find them all. It shouldn’t take long at all, because most of the guns turn up at crime scenes.

The principal poobahs of the Republican Party and the pundits to whom they turn for the pulse of their party are perplexed that people they have so long believed to be passive are coming out of their primary voting places and informing exit pollsters that they are seeking payback. “What’s that?” the poobahs say. “The voters are angry? What on Earth could be going on?”

Yep, that’s precisely how out of touch with their voter base Republican Party leadership and far too many Republican members of Congress have become. It’s as if elevation to the lofty environs of Rome on the Potomac somehow pressurizes their ear canals in such a way as to render them incapable of hearing the distant pleadings of the plebeians who sent one there. A less kind and more cynical explanation for our elected representatives’ inability to hear our voices possibly could be attributed to the simple but ugly fact that once they have achieved their goal, election, they don’t give a plebeian’s patootie about our goals.

But let’s be generous and assume that those who convocate under that great marble dome simply are out of touch because they are just too busy doing the work of the people. Of course, that raises the question: what people? But I’ll not be snarky and instead offer our currently shocked Republican leaders a means by which they perhaps could keep a sharper ear to the wind or an ear on the rail or an ear wherever.

While the more doddering of these imperial pachyderms may be unfamiliar with the workings of the internet except perhaps for their smartphones, Al Gore’s ingenious invention could well be the way to prevent future surprises such as the one occurring now. This is not simply watching the many political websites and deducing from their daily parades of reporting and opinion what is going on in the hearts and minds of the people. Survey all that on a daily basis, and all you’re likely to glean is the thinking of the political class of pundits and players, movers and shakers, those who operate on the periphery of political power.

My response: read the commenters if you want to have your finger on the pulse of the voters. As a fairly frequent writer of blog posts, I make a point of always reading the comments on every piece of mine that gets published. Moreover, I frequently read the comments on others’ articles, sometimes finding them more interesting and informative than the original tract. Not infrequently, I find nuggets I can incorporate into my own writings. Yes, you sometimes must sort through personal bilge and back-and-forth, even occasional rabid intolerance, but there is something valuable there that can be mined and refined by those in power truly interested in knowing the mood of the people.

Any political organization with a program designed to monitor and distill comments on conservative political news websites would have long ago been able to provide Republican leaders with ongoing status reports on how anger was building to a critical level in those people who care enough about the political situation to read and comment on those sites. Even with no supportive data, common sense tells you there’s a strong corollary between those who read and comment on the current political environment and those who vote. Also, an aspect of comments that makes them a more accurate barometer of building political weather fronts than the phone polls currently used is that the anonymity of the internet permits commenters to have their say without any possible attribution if they choose to hide behind a username. It’s a given that any pollster who calls us nowadays likely knows all our basic identification data, perhaps down to what we eat for breakfast, while we don’t know beans about who he may be. Thus, our answers to such pollsters may be significantly more guarded than if hammered out forcefully on a keyboard.

And yes, I’m aware of the Big Brother implications here. I’ll be reading your comments.

Crossposted at American Thinker

Unable to stop the phenomenon that has become the Trump movement by attacking its leader, the pretentious princes of the Grand Old Party are now resorting to attacking their own rebellious base, and it is clear that some conservative journalists are too willing to help them do it. The most disturbing of these attacks comes from what has become Trump’s most determined journalistic antagonist, National Review. That NR has now turned its guns on Middle America saddens me, for I have long been a reader and admirer of their many fine writers. I was truly dismayed recently when that conservative publication devoted an entire issue to destroying Trump with almost two dozen leading establishment editors and journalists writing opinion pieces against him. That effort to terminate Trump failed so miserably it is almost laughingly ironic, for not only did it get NR dropped from the next Republican debate, it further established Donald as the anti-establishment leader and broadened his attraction.

Perturbed by their failure to truncate the Trump campaign, National Review is now doubling down in a coming issue with a truly toxic article (behind a pay wall) by roving editor, Kevin D. Williamson. Toxic is the nicest way I can think of to characterize the malevolent tirade that Williamson has produced for a publication apparently hell-bent on reducing its readership to a tiny core of conservative purists. Williamson, who frequently likes to drop into his pieces the downhome bona fide that he’s from West Texas, has probably doomed his chances of ever leading any parades back home with his virulent attack on the blue-collar class, the workers who populate the two largest industries in that region, farming/ranching and the oilfield, in particular, the latter because of the recent collapse of oil prices.

Williamson apparently thinks blue-collar workers whose lives get turned upside down when their jobs disappear due to economic downturns or their manufacturing jobs getting shipped offshore or their mines closing due to new more restrictive government regulation, are all a bunch of worthless bums and crybabies who should just load up the pickup and become the new Okies. What with the absolute collapse of the energy industry in West Texas in the past year and unemployment through the roof, I think Kevin might find it somewhat difficult selling that concept to any of his fellow West Texans any time soon. I’d give up Mexican food for a year to see him stand on one of the dozens of idle drilling platforms and try to read that piece to a crowd of long-unemployed oilfield workers. Here are a few of Kevin’s insulting words (excerpted –and defended– here):

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap, theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Did you folks out there in Odessa and all the other oil patch communities get that? This conservative elitist says your town deserves to die. And that’s just a sample of the toxic rot in the lengthy article. Jazz Shaw at Hot Air is shocked, like many other conservative authors who have read Williamson’s diatribe:

This is truly stunning. A broadside attack on America’s middle class is apparently the last recourse of truly lost and desperate souls. Worst of all, it’s a denial of reality. I don’t know how things are in hardscrabble, white West Texas, but I happen to live in one of those hardscrabble, white Upstate New York burgs and Kevin is living in some sort of dream world. Garbutt serves as a useful metaphor in his tale, but it bears little to no relevance to the reality these communities have dealt with nor the government policy failures which let them down.

Well I do know how things are in hardscrabble, white West Texas, and they’re not good at all. Like me, Shaw has lived in stricken areas among the people that Williamson and National Review think just need to load up a U-Haul and move on to better prospects. I wonder if Kevin intends those emigrants to include members of my wife’s pioneering family of cowboys, ranchers, buffalo hunters and Indian fighters who have been on West Texas land for more than 150 years? Or members of my own family who have been working in that oil patch for sixty years? Most of them are suffering in varying degrees from the regional depression caused by the steep drop in oil prices. Those crybabies should simply abandon their homes, their schools, their churches, their old and debilitated, just pick up and go, huh, Kevin?

It is becoming increasingly clear to the American middle class that Donald Trump is exposing the pretension of urban Eastern conservatism and the Republican Party leadership, who think they, and only they, know what’s best for all of us out here in flyover country. But what all those who fancy themselves our betters can’t process is that it is the very fact that they are so out of touch with ordinary folks that is Trump’s greatest attraction. The more the conservative aristocracy attacks Trump the more the people listening to him, those middle class working folks, are inclined to support him.

Many Americans born into Democrat households have said, as Reagan did, that they didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the party left them. One has to wonder how many millions of those Americans are beginning to think the same of the Republican Party. I’m not even a Trump follower, having voted for Cruz in my state primary, but I can tell you that with these attacks on the middle class and the blue-collar working class, these GOP elites and their conservative oracles are alienating me. Attack Trump all you want; he’s fair game, but don’t turn your frustrations from that back on mainstream America. You establishment Republicans loved flyover America when its denizens believed all your lies and forgave your endless broken promises to fix their broken country; but now you want to treat these same folks with contempt and disdain since they’ve found a candidate whom you say lies and promises even more convincingly than you.

National Review, how about putting more effort into understanding the reasons for Trump’s appeal and less into bashing his followers, a move guaranteed to make you Trump’s main recruiting office?

Crossposted at American Thinker

According to The Guardian, The Vlad called Syrain President Bashar al-Assad yesterday and told him that he’ll be withdrawing Russian forces from the fight in Syria for whatever reason;

His move was clearly designed to coincide with the start of Syrian peace talks in Geneva and will be seen as a sign that Russia believes it has done enough to protect Assad’s regime from collapse.

Putin said he had ordered his diplomatic staff to step up their efforts to achieve a settlement to end the civil war which has cost at least 250,000 lives and is due to enter its sixth year on Tuesday.

I guess maybe the politics of the fight were a little too much for Putin to control from Moscow. According to AFP the White House hopes that it’s a signal that Putin is accepting to the idea that Assad can step down from Syria’s throne.

Opposition groups, the United States and key European countries have called on Assad to go as part of a negotiated transition.

“We have talked about how Russia’s continued military intervention to prop up the Assad regime made the efforts to reach a political transition even more difficult,” said [White House spokesman Josh Earnest].

Yeah, I wouldn’t count on Russia to be too helpful in that regard. They started their military participation in September in an attempt to reinforce Assad’s position and I don’t think Putin is willing to throw that investment away. We can be reasonably sure that he wasn’t influenced by anything that the Obama/Kerry team did.

I was about to turn 16. I lived in a tenement on the north side of Chicago. Magnolia Avenue from Montrose to Wilson was lined with the red brick three and four story buildings. The tiny apartments were barely heated with steam radiators in winter and cooled by nothing in summer. People dragging mattresses out on to fire escapes at night for reprieve from those big brick ovens were common. On some days the local firehouse would open up a hydrant and the neighborhood kids would splash around in the street. With my few friends, we beat the heat spending many days at the Lake Michigan Montrose beach. Whenever I think of my time in Chicago, it is of the north side’s trash strewn streets and concrete. Quite a contrast for one transplanted from West Virginia’s green hills.

I came to be in Chicago because my Dad migrated to the big city that was filled with factories and factory work. I suppose that made us economic immigrants. We were just part of that great big American middle class that could move, if need be, to find work and better our lives while along the way providing the labor force that built a nation. I suppose it is the disappearing middle class these days.

About a year later I would become a 16 year-old high school dropout working full time in one of those Chicago factories. It is certainly not a course I would recommend for any young person, but it worked out well for me and I learned valuable lessons not taught in Chicago’s school system of the day.

In 68, my brother Jerry was finishing up his Army tour with a Vietnam tour. He stood final muster this past year a victim of the ravages of Agent Orange. Jerry finished High School, the first in my family to do so and immediately enlisted into the Army. Just another member of that American middle class doing what he thought he was supposed to do.

A “conservative” writer from National Review believes “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.” His writing is as much of an attack on Donald Trump as it is on the people Trump appeals to. The people who feel no one in snob America gives a rat’s rear end about them and has not for a long time. The people who no longer have a factory to look to for that job that can give a youngster with no path to an expensive college a start in life. So the welfare state moves in and does to these communities what it has done to others – destroys them and their chance with big government, a globalist worldview and corporate centered trade pacts that eliminates the jobs they might have had. If this is conservative thinking, then I suppose I am no conservative. I want no part of National Review’s ivory tower thinking. This thinking has made America ripe for a communist like Bernie Sanders who promises everything except opportunity and work.

But, back to the summer of 68. The democrats had their convention there in 68. The Yippies, Youth International Party, organized demonstrations for the convention. Some called the Yippies radicalized hippies. Hippies the pot smoking, LSD dropping, communal free-love anti-war draft dodgers. These demonstrations morphed into riots. I watched some of it on television and listened to the rioters who were having the crap kicked out of them by the Chicago Police Department chanting ‘The whole world is watching.” And probably rooting for the cops I thought.

Among these hippie yippie commie loving American GI hating miscreants, you could probably find people like Bernie Sanders, Bill and Hill, John Kerry, Obama mentor and terrorist Bill Ayers and a whole list of others who are still trying to destroy our country. They are starting to turn up now at Trump rallies because he is the antithesis of what they have been indoctrinated to believe. It would not surprise me at all if these demonstrations continue until they erupt into full scale riots similar to those in the summer of 68. Maybe Governor Kasich might want the Ohio National Guard to bone up on riot control.

I left Chicago after walking into Staff Sergeant Ball’s Recruiting station a few days shy of my 19th birthday.

© 2016 J. D. Pendry All Rights Reserved